Mysteries of the Amber Room
Richard Nalley, 03.29.04
It was one of Russia's masterpieces of artistry until it vanished with the Nazi retreat of 1945. Now a magnificent replica has been created to rival the original.
Stepping inside the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace museum outside St. Petersburg is like slipping into a fairy tale--the story of Aladdin's cave, maybe. Soaring walls bloom with polished shards of amber--bloodred, honey-blond, milky-gold--inset with jeweled mosaics and gilded trim. The Amber Room was opened with an emotional ceremony, and major press across Europe, last May. But as with many fairy tales, especially Russian ones, there is a dark side to the Amber Room too, a shadow of legend and open-ended mystery.
Standing in its presence, a fragile December snowfall floating past the Catherine Palace's gilded windows, I wonder what improbable passions drove the creation of this monumental jewel box, the work of 25 years of genius and frustration, of 70 artisans and scholars reinventing lost crafts and techniques. To put it mildly, we are unlikely ever to see anything like it attempted again.
But of course, it has been done once before. When all is said and done, this ravishing Amber Room is only the reproduction of a fabled original. And no one who knows the story is likely to forget it anytime soon.
The original Amber Room that stood in this place was one of the great masterpieces of the 18th century. Somewhere along the line--no one at the Catherine Palace museum now seems quite sure when--it acquired the immodest nickname "the Eighth Wonder of the World," still to be found in articles and guidebooks today. That, however, is more than can be said for the first Amber Room itself, which disappeared during the chaotic final months of World War II and can't be found at all.
As ARTnews put it, "The mystery surrounding its fate is to the Russians what UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle are in the West." And not just to Russians. The mystery has sunk its hooks into an international mélange of politicians, filmmakers, ex-Nazis, treasure divers, art historians and freelance conspiracy paranoids. The Amber Room files of the Stasi, the former East German secret police, run to some 180,000 pages, which apparently someone has counted. Internet sites raise virtual eyebrows over the supposed curse that has caused the suspicious deaths of several Amber Room hunters; on Amberroom.org, Baron Eduard von Falz-Fein, founder of the Amber Room Club (which included French mystery writer Georges Simenon), pledges million to its finder. There are at least four suspense novels in English on the topic, all called The Amber Room. The missing panels have even played a role in international relations. Russian president Boris Yeltsin lobbed a diplomatic grenade during a 1991 state visit to Germany by proclaiming that he knew where the Germans had hidden the Amber Room and he jolly well wanted it back.
The mystery began a generation ago amid an orgy of art theft, as the Nazis systematically stripped Russia of tens upon thousands of paintings, jewels, icons and other treasures. In the words of one commentator, "It was not only looting on the largest scale the world had ever seen, it was an attempt to destroy a whole culture." But the Amber Room was not just another trophy in the catalog; it was a centerpiece of the plan.
On June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler opened Operation Barbarossa, launching three million German soldiers across the borders of the Soviet Union under swarming clouds of air cover. By September 8 the Wehrmacht's Army Group North had sprinted around a last line of defenders and closed the city then known as Leningrad in a death grip.
As the shells began to fall in suburban Pushkin, officials of the village's sprawling Catherine Palace museum enlisted every able-bodied woman and child in a frantic effort to pack up hundreds of Czarist-era artifacts for removal to the city or across the Ural Mountains. The bitterness of their situation was compounded by the fact that the most famous of all Russian art treasures was entrusted to their care--and they could not save it.
The Amber Room was the third of the chambers along the Catherine Palace's majestic Golden Corridor. A gift to Peter the Great in 1716--celebrating peace between Russia and Prussia, as fate would have it--the Amber Room was said to have nearly bankrupted its giver, the Prussian King Frederick William I. Installed in the summer palace in Pushkin (then and now called Tsarskoye Selo, or "Czar's Village"), the Amber Room served as a private meditation chamber for Czarina Elizabeth, a gathering room for Catherine the Great's intimate circle, a prize cabinet for amber connoisseur Alexander II. It was said to glow from within, to radiate a mystical energy. It was arguably the most famous room in Europe east of Versailles. And for that very reason, in September of 1941, the Amber Room was doomed.
To this day, no one is quite sure why. Was the museum staff too late, too concerned with its fragility or simply too wary to move it? (Who, after all, wanted to tell Comrade Stalin he'd dismantled the Amber Room?) Whatever the reason, curator Anatoly Kuchumov left the priceless panels in place, thinly disguised under sheaths of painted paper, gauze and cotton. But the Nazis were nothing if not efficient in their rapacity. For certain well-briefed troops on the scene, the Amber Room was as obvious as a beacon.
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